Today I am very excited to announce that Daptiv will be joining Changepoint to bring unmatched project portfolio management (PPM) and professional services automation (PSA) solutions to the market. Changepoint has acquired Daptiv as a very strategic step in building a strong future for the new combined
company that will truly benefit the customers, employees, and partners of both organizations.

For those unfamiliar with Changepoint, it is a Toronto-based based company that provides on-premise and hosted PSA and PPM solutions to businesses around the world. Like Daptiv, Changepoint is a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader, but the solutions serve different markets within the space and together create a highly robust, complementary and non-competitive portfolio of world-class PSA and PPM solutions.

Now that the acquisition has been announced, I want to assure you that none of the Daptiv products and services you’ve come to know will skip a beat. It will be business as usual and all services will be supported throughout and beyond this acquisition. This acquisition creates a broader portfolio of world-class solutions, making Changepoint the only company to have recognized market leading solutions in both PSA and PPM with complete customer delivery flexibility, including on-premise, hosted, and pure SaaS.

This is great news for Daptiv customers…

Changepoint’s acquisition of Daptiv is focused on investing in and growing the business to continue to provide customer value. This new organization will be stronger and better positioned to innovate and lead in the industry.

Our customers are critically important to us. We greatly value your business and will work hard to make sure the transition is seamless and the acquisition creates added customer value.

We will continue to fully support, maintain and invest in both the Changepoint and Daptiv solutions. We know many of you are currently deploying and/or expanding Daptiv and we will work hard to ensure your businesses see positive near and long-term benefits from this acquisition.

Finally, we will keep the lines of communication open and make every effort to answer all of your questions. We will make sure your account managers and our executives are available for you to answer any questions you might have.

We look forward to working with our now vastly expanded customer community to find new ways to encourage communication and sharing of ideas, best practices and product direction. The quality and breadth of services you’ll have access to will only expand with this acquisition.

You can follow us through this acquisition on Twitter to learn more about additional benefits in the coming days (@Daptiv, and @_Changepoint). For more information please view the official press release here and a letter from Jim Byrnes, president and CEO of Changepoint here.

It’s been a great first half of the year and we are excited to publicly share the results we’re seeing with you. In the past two quarters, we have seen our new business pipeline flourish both in North America and abroad. We have achieved record new business growth during the first two quarters of 2014, up more than 30 percent from the same period last year. In addition to strong growth in North America, these gains stem in large part from tremendous momentum in international markets, with over 200 percent year-over-year combined bookings growth in the EMEA and APAC regions.

We attribute all this customer momentum to the targeted shifts we’ve made aimed at meeting heightened demand we’re seeing from the enterprise for a flexible and scalable SaaS-based PPM solution. Organizations in the healthcare, education, technology, and financial services industries, among others, continue to turn to us for PPM solutions that help run their businesses more efficiently and effectively. Our goal is to make it possible for these companies to streamline their employees’ day-to-day interactions, dramatically reducing the complexity of managing multiple teams, projects, and tasks.

Other key milestones that have contributed to this year’s strong performance include:

A newly launched Organizational Change Management (OCM) practice , which allows customers to successfully identify, plan, and manage the inevitable changes associated with new technology implementation with the help of our experienced and dedicated OCM guidance.

The first half of 2014 has been fantastic and we anticipate the growth to continue in the second half, fueled by our aggressive product and services advancements and continued strategic investments in both domestic and international markets. Remember you can follow our progress in-real time and interact with us on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn.

If you are a Project Portfolio Management (PPM) professional then you are both a steward and champion of change, you have to be out of necessity; the types of projects you manage are instruments of change by their very nature in that their completion delivers something new. However, studies show as many as a third of projects derail because businesses are unprepared to make the fundamental changes necessary for their success, such as a new technology deployment [1]. Therefore, whether PPM professionals realize it or not they fall into either the intentional or accidental change manager category. Accidental change managers do not actively see themselves in the light of a change steward, whereas intentional change managers consider change management to be a responsibility and requirement of their role. Regardless of category, all PPM professionals can benefit from additional training in successful change management tactics.

When Prosci recently asked PPM professionals what they would do differently on their next project, the second most popular answer was securing sufficient organizational change management (OCM) resources, combined with an emphasis on preparation and planning. The same report also found projects that actively incorporate formal change management programs were an astonishing six times more likely to meet or exceed their stated goals [2].

During this webinar Mark Mullaly, president at Interthink Consulting, Inc., AJ Holley, director of change management and learning at Daptiv and Jesse Jacoby, founder of Emergent a leader in business transformation and strategic change management, will prepare PPM professionals, who are “accidental change managers,” to transform into “intentional change leaders” while providing new and valuable tools to PPM professionals who have already implemented formal change management principles and practices to heighten project success rates.

By attending you will gain a better understanding of the importance, principles, and execution of effective OCM. You will also learn the habits of highly effective change leaders and how to thoughtfully incorporate company-wide OCM approaches for project and program success.

Project success has nothing to do with time, budget or scope according to David Blumhorst the Vice President of Solutions and Services for Daptiv. David recently sat down with Cornelius Fichtner on the PM Podcast to explain how these three constraints, traditionally thought of as solid measures for success, are actually better suited to gauge performance. Projects are investments and their primary purpose is to drive change; therefore, even if time, budget and scope are met but the desired change does not occur how can the project be considered effective? Instead, David recommends PPM professionals define the business objective they’re trying to achieve with the project and then assess its success in accomplishing this goal.

David suggests PPM professionals determining their business objective ask themselves: What is the primary reason for investing in this project? Does it align with the purpose of the business or is it an unnecessary expense? With this business target in place, instead of measuring tasks which allocate valuable technical skills to monitoring, PPM professionals can optimize those same resources and lead their team to a project bulls-eye.

Once PPM Professionals have redefined project success, David recommends avoiding these top four common pitfalls:

A lack of business goals – Without a goal scope creep can become endless, pulling a project away from its target and towards a pricy budget and lengthy timeline.

Starting a project not aligned with business objectives – Determining upfront if a project is a good investment or a waste of limited resources is crucial.

Failing to plan ahead for ROI – Measuring a project’s return on investment requires forethought. Once a project is finished, it is difficult to determine this measurement if there was never an initial baseline established for comparison.

Excessive spending – Breaking the bank can be a product of the scope creep which can occur when the project is not aligned with a specific business objective.

David also encourages project managers to think outside the box to avoid locking themselves into rigid structures that don’t serve the project. To stay on track, here are his top four tips:

Have an elevator speech – Every project should be accompanied by a 30-second elevator speech that describes its purpose and reasoning in just a few sentences. This makes it simple to regularly revisit the business objective to quickly determine if the project truly aligns with the overall goals of the organization.

Consider other measurements in addition to ROI– Factors such as employee and customer satisfaction should be taken into consideration, as ROI is often not the only indicator of success.

View projects like you do investments – Look at multiple projects as investments in a portfolio, create rating systems, and determine the return on the portfolio as a whole.

Complete a success survey after each project – Survey stakeholders and shareholders to determine if the desired outcomes from the project were achieved from their diverse perspectives.

For more information on defining project success, you can listen to the entire PM Podcast online. Daptiv would like hear how you determine if your project has been a success. What types of metrics have you used to determine ROI? Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments section below, or reach out to us on Twitter at @Daptiv.

One of the most widely used tools for project management in software teams today is the spreadsheet. They are ubiquitous and heavily relied on by many organizations to manage data and make critical business decisions. Because spreadsheets are easy to use they may appear, at first glance, to be an excellent tool for independent analysis. However, the perception of the ease-of-use of spreadsheets is to some extent an illusion. As any project manager will tell you, they are often stretched far beyond the boundaries of their functionality. With limited scalability and reliability, they are also constrained by an organization’s ability to invest in additional technology capabilities to improve their trustworthiness.

Although fairly cheap and easy to use, spreadsheets can’t often be trusted as they are extremely vulnerable to errors. Recent research found most of the spreadsheets used by organizations contain errors—and that a considerable number of those errors are serious. It may be easy to get an answer from a spreadsheet; however, it is not necessarily easy to get the right answer. Particularly if you factor in potential human data entry errors, spreadsheets can often do more harm than good. These hidden problems can hinder the success of a project and create more costs than were initially budgeted.

Daptiv’s Dave Blumhorst recently discussed the nine inherent flaws of spreadsheets, and how they’re hampering the success of PPM professionals today on Wired’s Innovation Insights. To get a better understanding of how businesses can embrace alternative technologies to avoid spreadsheet limitations, you can read Dave’s entire piece on Wired.com.

We would also like to hear about your experiences using spreadsheets. Have you run into issues using spreadsheets to manage projects in your workplace? If so, what types of problems have you faced and what solutions have you found to alleviate them? Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments section below, or reach out to us on Twitter at @Daptiv with the hashtag #SpreadSheetFailure